Thursday, January 31, 2008

If these walls could talk, they'd vomit.

I was sitting in my local bar last night. It was after closing, and the manager had let a few of his regulars stay on. Including a girl I didn’t recognise, who had an Australian accent.

Myself: "Hey what are you doing? I’m the token Australian for this bar tonight."

Her: "You don’t remember me do you. I was here on Sunday. You were with a small group and you were all plastered. You and your mate were behind the bar pouring your own drinks. At one point you had a chick sitting in your lap and you were snogging her while you had a mouthful of Cashews. Your mate snorted a line of salt off the bar, then got up on the staircase and started singing Yothu Yindi songs while banging two wooden cocktail mixers together. I left at about 8pm, but apparently a few hours later people were walking around the pub naked."

Thursday, January 24, 2008

The High Price of Living

HEATH LEDGER(1979 – 2008)

Well, this sucks.

I learnt of Ledger’s death from my copy of the Sun this morning, as my tired eyes pored over the day’s news on my way to work. It’s kind of a morning ritual of mine, to sip my Red Bull while I digest the Tabloid’s daily dose of depressing stories.

I heard he got pretty messed up over the Joker role for the new Batman film, even suffering from chronic insomnia as he got into the mid-set of the homicidal lunatic. Did all of this lead to the drug overdose? Who knows, maybe time will tell. It’s just such a fucking waste, he was a talented actor – and he had a good four decades of roles left in him.

His premature death was a little unexpected, but isn’t that always the way with celebrities? Those fuckers who dance with the devil every night, taunting the Grim Reaper with their over excessive life-styles, well they always live to be 100 years old (though Keith Richards doesn’t count, because he’s a vampire). It’s the quiet achievers who seem to slip off this mortal coil with unsettling ease.

Ledger was always special, because unlike most of our “Famous Aussie Imports”, he was actually born in Australia* (Perth to be exact). His surprising death reminded my of an equally surprising near-death story from last year, namely Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt.

Owen Wilson for fuck’s sake. The actor so laid back he couldn’t play a Cowboy without coming across as a Californian Surfer. Who would have seen that suicide attempt coming?**

After Owen was released from hospital, he spent time recuperating with his brother Luke and best mate Woody Harrelson.

These are the guys Owen hangs out with. The two most care free stoners in the history of Hollywood. I can imagine these guys getting together to smoke weed, and eat breakfast cereal at four in the afternoon while watching Spongebob Squarepants. I can’t imagine depression and suicide coming into the equation at all.

To make matters even stranger, the chick Owen decided to kill himself over was his ex-lover Kate Hudson:

A chick so scrawny that her front, looks like a ten year old boy’s back.

Stranger still, Owen was sick with grief because Kate had found new love with this Shit Nuts Dax Shepherd:

Whose main claim to fame, is acting on Ashton Kutcher’s reality TV show Punk’d. A show so god-awful, that most people would rather watch their families burn to death, than a single episode.

And my, what a fairy tale couple they made:

Hollywood is god damn bizarre.

* I’m not saying you have to be born in Australia to be considered Australian, I just always found it ironic that our "greatest exports" didn’t originate from the home land. Eg – Mel Gibson (New York), Nicole Kidman (Hawaii), Sam Neill (Northern Ireland), Russell Crowe (New Zealand), Hugo Weaving (Nigeria), Guy Pearce (England), Christ even our most beloved Race Horse, Phar Lap, was a kiwi.

*** And just to complete a trifecta of side notes, check out this story. It seems the Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting at Ledger’s funeral, because he played a gay man in the film Brokeback Mountain. The Dickheads.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Just 20 minutes a day...

It had been a particularly boozy night out, and my main dilemma wasn’t the onslaught of beer, so much that it was the series of shots at the finish. Red Bull and Jagermesiter had been our poison of choice, and I’d taken enough to power a model rocket ship to the moon and back. It was fun in the pub, not so much now that I was at home and trying to get some slumber.

I was exhausted, yet sleep was completely beyond me. I lay on my bed vibrating like a dieing blow fly, and came to the conclusion that early morning television would prove more entertaining than my bedroom ceiling.

I lay on the couch like a raped Dolphin, and idly flicked through the channels with middling interest. I felt like Goldilocks as I surfed the 4am schedule looking for the perfect show. Film 4’s German movie was too baffling. The music channel’s R n B show was too annoying. But for some strange reason, the infomercial channel was just right.

The item on Sale was an “Exciting New Revolution in Home Exercise”. Some bizarre post apocalyptic looking device which consisted of the usual springs, straps and seat arrangements – perfect for sculpting one’s abs in the comfort of their own living room. “Everything that came before this was crap, this is the real thing” the commercial boldly declared to it’s audience, which I’m guessing consisted of me, a handful of off duty Cab drivers and the odd serial killer or two.

Only 20 minutes a day was all this device took to leave you with a chiselled body to rival the God’s themselves, and after your work out you can simply fold up the bastard and slip it underneath your bed (Provided, of course, that your bed was at least five foot off the ground).

These infomercials have been molesting our air-waves for years, yet this one kind of stood out because of their choice of presenters. There was the obligatory Gym expert explaining how the god-awful piece of shit works, but he was flanked by two "compulsory celebs" – Elle MacPherson and Patrick Duffy. It just struck me as a completely random pairing of people. Why not Heidi Klum and Burt Reynolds? Or Naomi Campbell and Jimmy Smits?

No it, it was the MacPherson and Duffy show. What made the combination even more surreal was the different way the two had aged over the years. Patrick Duffy had a headful of grey hair and soulless, vacant eyes. He looked like somebody’s Grandpa who’d wandered in off the street with his nuts hanging out of his shorts.

But Elle MacPherson looked fantastic.

By all means she shouldn’t look this good. She’s 44 years old, had about a dozen kids, and has spent 23 hours of every day baking in the sun. She should look like a Cane Toad’s vagina. But she doesn’t. She looks like a Goddess.

And it’s not the piece of shit “Ab-omatic” or whatever the fuck she’s selling to thank for her looks. It’s the Australian blood.

Take me for instance, I’m 30 now, yet I look fresh faced and sexy as fuck.

The other night I was trying out some new dance moves at this night club, and the DJ spotted me. She was so excited by my raw sexiness that she leapt onto the dance floor and bit me on the arse.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Ho Ho Ho

The festive Season is over for another 12 months, and time to get back into the weekly grind.

In retrospect, it’s been another gutless Christmas for yours truly.

I spent the prior Christmas drinking Vodka and watching Sitcoms, so I planned to make more of an effort for this one. The tentative schedule was a local pub for Christmas lunch, and then on to a Christmas party in Wandsworth.

But those plans went right out the fucking window when I spent the entire day in bed with a rotten cold.

I’d had various Christmas parties throughout the month of December, and it seemed that wandering around the streets of London at 2am in zero degree temperatures looking for cabs home, had taken it’s toll on my health.

So I spent the majority of Jesus’ birthday cooped up in bed like the English Patient, coughing, sneezing and spraying mucous all over the shop like an epileptic Porn Star.

At about 9pm the bed sores were starting to kick in, so I went to the pub across the road from my house for a few beers. I ended up watching BBC2’s Christmas movie (which was Pulp Fiction, I shit you not) with the owner of the pub. I left the pub at midnight, came home for a bit of Playstation, and then went back to bed. Yeah, that’s about it.

I’m living on the other side of the world from the rest of my family, so my Christmas Days were never going to be all that spectacular. But the holiday is coming dangerously close to evaporating from my life altogether.

That will be a New year’s resolution for this year: I’ll have to make more of an effort for Christmas Day 2008.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Here We Go Again.

I got stuck behind this fat guy on the stairs at Clapham Junction this morning, because of him I missed my train by ten seconds and so had a 20 minute wait in the cold for the next one. I passed the time by reading The Sun’s comprehensive list of every Londoner who was shot and stabbed over New Year’s Eve. Oh yeah that’s right, it’s 2008 now.

Happy New Year People.

Thank God 2007 is over. I know we should count every day as a blessing, but 07 was a fucking tough year for me personally, and I’m sure as fuck not going to miss it now it’s gone.

I got thrown in the deep end at work at the start of that year, and had to paddle like a frightened Cocker-spaniel with no hind legs to keep my head above water. I also kind of let my finances get a little out of hand (as can often happy to us spend thrifts in London) – at one particular low point I was getting hammered at work with a project that had gone completely pear shaped, while two banks were calling me up personally to discuss my overdrawn credit cards.

The only way stubborn fuckers like me learn the error of our ways is with some tough love, and there’s nothing like smashing your comfort zone to learn some valuable life lessons. I’m in a much better mind set now than I was 12 months ago, and after a full year of chipping away at my debts and learning new work skills, I am grudgingly grateful for 2007 as a character building exercise. That being said, fuck you 07 you toothless old whore, because there’s a fresh new princess in town – 08.

2008. The Future. Sadly there is still no sign of a robot or ape revolution.